Article by Frederic De Meyer
– Trends series, article 1 –
How certain are you that your business will still exist twenty years from now?
Does this keep you awake?
Maybe this question is not bothering you at all. After all, twenty years is a long time. But if you do care, you might find out that it is very hard to provide an answer to this question. Ultimately, the answer depends on how well you anticipate and adapt to long-term shifts that might not even be visible, or that are visible but their exact direction and amplitude is not yet known. Very often you don’t seem to have any sort of influence on or control over these trends. So how could you take them into account?
Ford and Barbie
If Ford would not have adapted to its clients’ demand for more customization, if it had stick to its founders’ vision of uniformity, it would have gone bankrupt a century ago. Mattel’s Barbie lost its market dominance in a single year to brandnew competitor Bratz, because it failed to see how new youngsters are maturing much earlier in life. As these examples show, long-term shifts form short-term threats to companies who don’t recognize them and act on them. Luckily, they also form opportunities for those who do.
Trends impact companies AND industries
It’s not only companies that are affected by trends and megatrends. Complete industries can undergo very profound changes due to these shifts. For instance, the emergence of a ‘global grid’ enabled new business models such as ‘peer-to-peer’ lending in the financial sector, ‘fan funding’ in the music industry, crowdsourcing and open innovation in the marketing sector. For established companies in these industries, the capital question now is whether they should embrace these new business models, or stick to the old ones (with all the risks this entails).
Hard, but not impossible to integrate into strategic thinking
All these influences make it very hard for companies to reply to the original question: “How certain are you that your company will survive in twenty years from now?” Companies often don’t have any influence over these trends, so it’s even harder to assess how they will impact their business, and how to adapt one’s strategy to it.
It is hard, but certainly not impossible. Megatrends often offer unique ways to rethink a business and better prepare it for the long term. I’ll provide some examples of how companies do this in my next article, but the picture beneath already provides a general overview of which corporate activities can benefit from the influence of megatrends:
Of course, not all of the megatrends have an influence over all of these activities. The exact nature and the importance of this impact will depend on the industry you serve; as well on the way you operate your business. But the picture above stresses the importance of having a thorough look at megatrends and assess how exactly they impact your business. In the third article of this series, I will provide a concrete step-by-step approach on how to do this.
